Failure can be instructive in the way it equips one to deal with the future. For instance, children touch a hot stove only once. However, in spite of centuries-old books still being available, history seems to have a brittle and porous memory. She's less like the erudite child and more like a fickle mistress who flops into bed with Jose Cuervo mere weeks after being spurned, burned and swearing off men, no thanks to Jack Daniel. Given the state of development in Asia – particularly apropos of China and India – there are a couple of chapters from recent history that are especially instructive:

• Air quality
• The real cost of the car

Deep beneath Subury [Ontario], thick veins of copper and nickel are mined by international conglomerates Vale Inco (formerly Inco) and Xstrata (formerly Falconbridge). During the 1950s and 1960s, Sudbury underwent rapid expansion. Fueled by rising commodity prices, new mines sprouted like mushrooms on manure, each one adorning its gleaming smelting operation with a filthy smoke stack. Apart from being rich with valuable metals, Sudbury's ore also contained much sulfur. Consequently, smelting it yielded enormous quantities of sulphur dioxide. Apart from being a useful way to preserve dried apricots, sulphur dioxide also creates acid rain, the toxicity of which was certainly not lost on Sudbury's ecosystem. When I started visiting Sudbury in the 70s, the entire city was stark, barren and devoid of colour ¹⁾. It was dead. Recognizing this calamity, mines sought to remedy the issue by doing something responsible sharing the problem. Inco erected what was then the world's tallest smokestack to disperse the sulfur over a broader area, hoping that in diffuse quantities, the sulphur would be less problematic. It wasn't until the 1990s that the mines installed scrubbing equipment to remove sulphur from the exhaust gases. Coupled with the reduction in environmental sulphur, the hard work of Sudbury's residents was rewarded by a slow and gradual return of trees and vibrant colour to the environment. Although Sudbury's mines still have much room for improvement, the SuperStack (which continues to dominate the Sudbury skyline) reminds us of the progress that we've made.

As the price of oil winds its way into triple-digit territory – a point from which it's unlikely to ever descend – US consumers continue to buy SUVs, drive nearly everywhere and build (and inexplicably desire) vinyl-sided suburban tract homes, where they can isolate themselves and organize all of their distractions with clever compartmentalized shelving units from The Container Store. The way I see it, a lack of places for all one's things is really more a symptom of having too many things, than a dearth of places to store them. In Wild Ducks Flying Backward ²⁾, Robins writes:

Now, given the amount of time that Americans squander sitting in snarled traffic, given the sub-prime funded absurdity of living 60 Km from one's place of employment, and given the relative predictably and calm sense of community inherent in public transit, you'd think that developing nations would strive to emulate the best parts of the US and avoid the earlier calamitous paths that lead to:

• Dismantling a previously effective passenger rail system
• Sanctioning and encouraging corporate acquisition and destruction of efficient public-transit systems
• Endorsing and promoting the corporate-sponsored financial legerdemain that led to the current crisis in capital markets
• Subsidizing gasoline prices directly or though military-backed support of fabourable political regimes
• Construction of coal-fired power plants without purification/scrubbing equipment

Emerging giants understand these things and are profiting from these lessons, right? No, of course not. Determined to be just like the US, whose earlier and initial grow was supported by automotive manufacturing, India is launching a low-cost car so everyone can have a shot at driving. But, wait, you say. There simply isn't enough infrastructure for all those cars. “Not my problem,” says Ratan Tata, whose company will build the car. “That's a problem the Indian government has to deal with.” Nice.

Similarly, smaller economies like Malaysia support consumer-adoption of automobiles by subsidizing about 50% of the cost of gasoline – at substantial cost to the public treasury. Of course, as it always does, interference with market pricing leads to inefficiency. Roads cannot be constructed quickly enough to accommodate the rapid growth in vehicle traffic, so streets in Kuala Lumpur are often snarled with traffic, making driving even short distances an exercise in futility. Coupled with lax environmental standards and lower factor productivity, pollution in the city is atrocious.

China, because it's the largest country, is also the worst for both its own health and for the climate everywhere else on earth. For all the advanced technology incorporated into its manufacturing facilities, China does poor job of incorporating new technologies into environmental stewardship. Like India, China strives to build a robust automotive industry. Also like India, China also struggles with an infrastructure incapable of handling the growth of private automobile ownership. In the January/February issue of Mother Jones, there is an excellent article about the many problems China faces: desertification, soil erosion, air pollution, water shortages and toxic waste accumulation. To a lesser degree, the same issue was also tackled in Collapse, Jared Diamond's followup to his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel. Anyone grinning smugly should understand that he likely shares in the blame: were it not for the voracious appetites of western consumers, China would not have become the economic powerhouse it is today. In outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we've also outsourced the associated pollution. In the end, I'd argue that for whatever economic benefits are derived by exploiting China's comparative advantage in labour, everyone ends up worse off because we're going to choke to death on the pollution.

In addition to the apparent folly of using automobiles to drive (oh, the pun!) economic growth, two additional crucial differences exist that make the choice to mirror the US seem reckless. First, when the US began its own manufacturing-backed expansion, the world had not yet reached peak oil. Second, during the US expansion, competition for petroleum resources was among fewer than 3 billion people, less than half of the population that competes today for an increasingly scarce, and rapidly vanishing resource.

Although the Mother Jones article and Diamond's book both pointed out reasons for optimism, I'm not especially hopeful. The earth cannot support even a significant portion of India and China adopting the resource-intensive, selfish and myopic habits of the west. Is that fair? Injustice sells, and that's the card Tata played to justify his venture, “India does desperately need mass transit systems… both within cities and between cities. But poor Indian families also have a right to what millions take for granted elsewhere in the world. Should they be denied the right to independent transport?” No, they shouldn't, but I think that's a false dilemma. Owning a car isn't the only way to achieve independent transport. If we hope to thrive together, all of us need to settle on simpler living and more creative solutions to the world's problems. With the kind of not-my-problem thinking being bandied about, the likelihood of widely embraced creative solutions being adopted any time soon seems heart-breakingly and tragically small.